Meditation: a Process of Cultivating Enhanced Well-Being

Abstract

Meditation is the practise of training attention and has increasingly become implemented in mainstream healthcare. The current study compared non-meditators with two general approaches to meditation as follows: concentrative and insight-oriented. The latter entails focusing attention on a single object, whereas the former opens attention, in an accepting and non-judgmental way, to whatever arises within the mind. Compared to non-meditators, both meditation approaches demonstrated significantly enhanced mindfulness and also indicated lower perceived stress. However, when compared to non-meditators, only insight-oriented meditators reported significantly greater subjective well-being (SWB), which is thought to arise from the expansion of attention to unwholesome thoughts, cultivating acceptance of such thoughts, and therefore decreasing the surrounding emotional context. Nonetheless, no significant difference was noted on SWB between concentrative and insight-oriented meditators.